To Catch a Rabbit (11 page)

Leave it. Let them get on with their job.
Max’s voice was in her head and maybe he was right. Except that she felt something gnawing away inside her and it was always the same question. She thought about the young support officer she’d met in Doncaster worrying about a dead Chinese girl.
I can’t believe no-one’s looking for her.
But what if someone was, just as she was looking for Phil? A woman’s voice came back on the line to tell her that there was no further information and a colleague would be in contact regarding the poster campaign in due course. She looked up The Volunteer Arms on the Internet and phoned Jackie. Would she put up missing posters? There was a silence and then, very kindly, very gently, Jackie said no. There was no point, everyone in the village knew Phil and if they’d seen him they would have said. If he turned up, or if she heard anything, she’d certainly let Karen know. It seemed that everyone, except Karen, believed it was entirely plausible that he’d run off with another woman. She stared out at a bank of grey clouds above the house next door and tried to imagine Phil in Florida. She liked to think he would have let them know if he was going abroad, but she couldn’t be sure. He didn’t even tell their father when he got married to Stacey. Just phoned up one day:
by the way, guess what I did at the weekend.
Maybe the others were right and she should just leave it, wait for him to get in touch and get on with her life.

Max came home later that evening, long after the children were in bed, and found her Googling local newspapers for North Lincolnshire and South Yorkshire.

‘Can I get on there?’

‘Just a minute…’

‘No, I haven’t got a minute. Look, Karen. I need to check some details for tomorrow. We’re pitching for the Ptarmigan Project.’

‘I’m just checking Saturday’s Gazette.’

‘You’ve had all day. I’m sorry, but you’ll just have to leave it.’

‘Isn’t a Ptarmigan a kind of bird?’

‘In this case, they’re a Scottish development consortium and they have a very big shopping centre in the offing.’ His voice was rising. The muscles in his neck seemed to be battling for control of his vocal cords, veins standing out with the effort. ‘A shopping centre which I’d quite like to design, so that my employers continue to pay me, so that I can put bread in the mouths of my children. Please, I won’t ask you again. Will you leave all this amateur sleuthing and get off my computer. Now!’

She sat very still and watched the screen blur. She wasn’t aware that she was crying until she blinked and her cheeks ran with tears. She wanted to say something about not waking the children, but she couldn’t speak. If he’d tried to hold her or just put his hands on her shoulders, things might have been different, but he didn’t.

‘They’re my children too. And Phil is my brother.’

‘For God’s sake, Karen, just leave it alone! You can’t magic him up. He’ll come back when he’s good and ready. Now, move.’

As she got up, he stepped aside to let her get to the door. He went straight to the desk and logged himself on. Karen walked out on to the landing and stood for a moment, waiting for him to apologise, until she realised he wasn’t going to.

The next morning, she walked the children to school and came home to the silence of the house. She filled it with the sound of the vacuum cleaner and Radio Two in every room. She’d never liked housework, but today she wanted to do it, dusting and polishing, wiping marks off the paintwork. After an hour, she sat down on the stairs, sweating and breathless. She felt an overwhelming desire to get on top of everything, to straighten it all out. A small drift of dust behind one of the banister rails caught her eye and she rubbed it away with her fingertip. Lives could be like that. There one minute, gone the next. Like Cara, who’d hardly begun, and the Chinese girl, who couldn’t have had much of a life before the heroin took her out of it.

Over the next hour, she worked more slowly. She retuned the radio in the bedroom to Radio Four. It was a drama about a woman dying of cancer. She started the ironing. Up here, the sound of the street was muffled, and the dormer window looked out at a sky of aeroplanes and birds. The iron nosed under the pleat of Sophie’s skirt and the steam rose to tickle her nostrils. The woman on the radio talked about her chemotherapy. Karen felt a rush behind her eyes and knew that if she let herself cry again, she might not be able to stop.

‘Sod this!’

Her voice sent the cat leaping off the bed in surprise. He looked at her uncertainly, his body clock whirring towards the possibility of feeding time. He dodged her feet as she pounded down the stairs to the study. She chewed the jagged edge of a broken fingernail while she waited for the computer to get going, then she put Johnny Mackenzie’s name into the search bar. Just to see.

‘Fancy a coffee?’ she said.

‘Canteen coffee? Not much. But if you’ve got time, we could nip out. There’s an Italian greasy spoon off Duke Street.’

‘Sounds lovely,’ she said sarcastically.

‘No, seriously, they have a proper coffee machine, cappuccino and that, but half the price of Starbucks.’

‘I’m not being funny, Sean, but can I meet you there? Rather than actually walk out of the building with a member of the opposite sex. I don’t want to give anyone any more ammunition to shoot me down.’

Sean nodded and left the office. He passed a couple of CID blokes in the corridor and asked them if they knew where DCI King was. They grunted in reply. He was about to say ‘what?’ when he realised that it had actually been a grunt like a pig. Funny joke time again. Well it was all right for them, they didn’t have to go out there everyday and deal with dog-shit on their shoes. He felt like slamming the door shut behind him, but he didn’t.

The Venetian Piazza Café was in a side street next to a charity shop. They sat at the back, away from the window.

‘I feel like a snout. Meeting in secret.’

She laughed for half a second, before her face went serious again. ‘What did you think about the news in this morning’s briefing?’

He shuffled in his seat. ‘Missed it. My bus was late. I heard it was another overdose.’

‘That’s what the autopsy says. The theory is that the body gets used to a certain level, so if it’s more pure than usual, it can be toxic. Su-Mai and the victim in Balby had taken something that was almost a hundred per cent. This latest girl had a methadone prescription, so she should have been weaning herself off, but it’s beginning to look like it was the same stuff that killed the other two.’

They went quiet as another customer came in and ordered a sandwich. Sean leant forward. ‘Was she on the game too?’

Lizzie shook her head. ‘Young mum with three kids.’

He felt a chill creep up the back of his neck.

‘There’s a connection between all three.’ Lizzie laid out three paper packets of sugar on the table. ‘First girl is from overseas, she’s on the game and she’s found here, the second is on the other side of town, but also foreign and a prostitute. Then number three, found a few hundred yards from number one. On your manor.’ She ripped the ends of the sugar packets and let the grains fall over the table. ‘Number one and number two are stuffed full of nearly-pure heroin and a pick and mix of male DNA, number three, same heroin, but only one recent sexual partner. I don’t know, maybe she was just unlucky.’

‘Why are you telling me all this?’ Sean’s head felt tight, like he had a migraine coming.

‘It helps me to think out loud. And I can trust you.’

She looked gorgeous. He rubbed his temples and forced himself to focus on what she was saying.

‘Now this guy from the HTS is asking for some of Su-Mai’s DNA,’ she said.

‘HTS?’

‘Human Trafficking Service.’

‘So we might find out who Su-Mai really is?’

‘Or at least where she’s from and how she got here.’

Sean had a vision of his sheet of flipchart paper, filled with names, dates, an address, a photograph of a family with a little girl in its centre. He wondered what it would be like, telling her mother, through an interpreter perhaps, that she had died peacefully on a sunny day, with the sound of birdsong in her ears, or the sound of the bypass at any rate.

‘Can you do that?’ he said. ‘Send her DNA off to another unit?’

‘I’ll have to get authorisation, and I need to think about how to get round Burger Barry. I just don’t want him saying no to me again, it’s getting boring.’

‘You’ll think of something.’ He meant it. There was just something about her that instilled confidence, even when she said she was being picked on. She didn’t make out that she was a victim; just made it sound like an irritation, something that got in the way.

‘Girl number three, what was she called, by the way?’

‘Taneesha McManus, known to her friends and family as Neesha.’

Sean spent the rest of the day on the Chasebridge Estate, listening to Carly’s unbroken monologue about the state of her house, which she’d bought off the council and wished she could give back. It was damp, the windows rattled, the new wallpaper wouldn’t stick. He felt numb. A pile of flowers had appeared at the foot of one of the blocks near the ring road. They watched a thin young man in a hoodie circle the estate on a BMX, standing up on the pedals, his tracksuit trousers hanging low around his hips. Sean squinted and tried to work out if he knew him but he couldn’t tell. These lads all looked the same. They didn’t dress to be different; they dressed to be invisible.

When he got home, he looked at the sheet of flipchart paper on his wall. He’d added a newspaper cutting:
Tragic Refugee Girl Found by Flat-mate.
The picture was the same over-exposed snap of both of them, crammed together in a photo-booth, which had been pinned on the incident board. You could see she’d been pretty. Then he got out a blue pen and drew a new line for Taneesha McManus. He didn’t have a photo for her, just a picture of the flowers but he knew what she looked like. She was the only one of the three that he’d seen alive. He could still see her bitten-down fingernails as she snatched the leaflet from him, her skinny legs, goose-bumped in the cold.

The Key Stage One assembly at Chasebridge Community Primary School was an easy-to-please sort of audience. They laughed at Sean’s jokes and put their hands up nicely at question time. He could have told them anything and they would have believed him. But he didn’t. He stuck to the script that he and Carly had been given: community policing, business as usual. They weren’t there to talk about the heroin problem, just to be a reassuring presence. Keeping things positive was supposed to help flush out those with information to share.

A little boy, with a smear of something ketchup-coloured on his chin, asked if Sean and Carly carried guns. A small girl wanted to know if they were married. There was barely stifled laughter from a couple of the teachers.

When it was over, Carly wanted to slip off to have a word with her son Daniel’s teacher. He was suffering from stress over his SATS revision and she wanted to know if they could lay off him a bit. Sean said he’d get the bus back into town, if she wanted to come back in the car. He was on a split shift, with time to kill, so he was easy. As he came out of the school gates, he nearly collided with someone on a bike, riding on the pavement.

‘Hey, steady on!’

The other guy flicked him the Vs and rode off. He was still trying to place him when the bike spun round and came back. Sean stood his ground until the last moment then stepped off the kerb just as the other man skidded to halt, his face close up.

‘Divvo Denton isn’t it? You still look like a twat.’ He spat on the floor and let out a shrill, false laugh. ‘Remember me?’

Sean stood still, wishing he wasn’t on his own. He had a taste like metal in his mouth. Lee Stubbs. Same year at school, different universes. Sean had avoided him for years. He’d handed over some dinner money in Year Seven, everyone did, then he’d kept well away. He was surprised Stubbs even knew his name.

‘I remember you,’ he said quietly.

‘Yeah? Well you can fuck off, copper!’

Stubbs turned his bike back up the hill and as he did so, his profile was framed by his hood. A woman hurried past. She looked over her shoulder, took in Sean’s uniform and pulled her coat tightly around her. It was a pity the parents weren’t as trusting as the children. Further up the hill, Stubbs was hovering on his bike, waiting for the woman.

He heard a car draw up alongside him, and instinctively stepped back and put his hand on his radio. The passenger window lowered and a familiar voice said, ‘Hop in.’

‘Lizzie? What are you doing here?’

‘Looking for you.’

He stooped to get into the passenger seat and fastened the seat belt.

‘You missed my performance for the kids.’

‘Never mind. You can do it again while we’re driving. You got half an hour?’

‘Sure, where are we going?’ He didn’t really care. Anywhere that wasn’t here would make him happy right now.

‘Forsyth Agrico. It’s a farming contractor based out near Thorne. They lease the land at Lower Brook Farm.’

‘Did Burger give you the number?’

‘No need. I just looked them up’

Forsyth Agrico was based in a converted filling station. Lizzie pulled up where the pumps would have been and they went into a bright reception area, subdivided from the original shop. A middle-aged woman in a flower-patterned blouse, topped off by a huge floppy bow, smiled up at them from behind the desk.

‘We’d like to speak to Mr Forsyth, if that’s possible.’ The woman took in Lizzie’s accent and Sean’s uniform and paled slightly.

‘Just one moment, I’ll see if he’s available.’ She got up from her chair and backed out through a door behind the desk, keeping them in her sights, as if they might do something unexpected.

‘It’s a shame you haven’t got a warrant card. That would make him more available.’

‘Thanks for nothing,’ Sean replied. ‘I could say the same about you.’

‘It would be handy. But why don’t you get one? Only a few weeks training, you’d be great as a…’

‘Proper copper? No thanks, I’m all right as I am.’

Sean was grateful that this conversation didn’t have to go any further. The only useful qualification he had was what Nan called his boyish grin. He used it to good effect when Mr Forsyth appeared.

‘How can I help you?’ Forsyth returned Sean’s smile with soft wet lips, but his eyes narrowed like a cat’s.

‘Is there somewhere we can have a chat?’ Lizzie looked around the reception area. It was clear that she didn’t want to talk here, where floppy-bow woman would be listening.